Burkburnett

There was the time the car broke down
outside Wichita Falls, the man I was
seeing drove half a day to rescue me
and the cat. It was just like the time
the car broke down outside Paducah,
but the car wasn’t unsalvageable, all I owned
flung to the passenger seat, I was a survivor
and it was a different man. There’s a poem in that, you say
into the heap of my clothes. Delicious symmetry,
glass around your ankles, wrapped in a passerby’s
picnic blanket. I had not thought about it since,
or had I, and could never remember the names
of those who stopped, if it had been my fault,
the color of the blanket and the wet road.